How hard he toiled and how greatly he suffered, I well know; for I have been with him during these twenty anxious years and I know his patience, his untiring effort, his infinite devotion to the Cause for which, only two months gone, he laid down his life.
I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest Everhard entered my life--how I first met him, how he grew until I became a part of him, and the tremendous changes he wrought in my life.

In this way may you look at him through my eyes and learn him as I learned him--in all save the things too secret and sweet for me to tell.
It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, as a guest of my father's* at dinner, he came to our house in Berkeley.

I cannot say that my very first impression of him was favorable.

He was one of many at dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongruous appearance.

It was "preacher's night," as my father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out of place in the midst of the churchmen.
* John Cunningham, Avis Everhard's father, was a professor at the State University at Berkeley, California.